


Henry's Ring

by stateofintegrity



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:33:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25506754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stateofintegrity/pseuds/stateofintegrity
Summary: A ring with mysterious properties makes the rounds of MASH 4077.
Relationships: Maxwell Klinger/Charles Emerson Winchester III
Comments: 12
Kudos: 19





	Henry's Ring

**Author's Note:**

  * For [remulon](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=remulon).



Lorraine sent the ring when she came across it in a drawer, careful to ensure it against the fickle post. Half the time her newspaper drowned in the yard, so she wasn’t  _ really  _ surprised that sending items 8,000 miles was a chancy venture. Henry hadn’t worn the thing - a sovereign ring with a rosy chip - since the earliest days of their courtship. For reasons she could not entirely name, there was something autumnal about this thought and she pressed the circle of gold to her cheek to warm it before wrapping it in tissue paper for its journey. 

***

Radar’s hand actually buzzed when he took up the day’s mail bag. He’d never encountered a rattlesnake, but the marrow of his bones knew that dangerous, organic signal. Or maybe this was the hot, sweet, membranous murmur of bee wings - something pollen-nurtured and alien and golden as the gift that lived inside of his head. 

Honey. 

Venom. 

He shook his head. Maybe his “radar” was just off. 

***

Henry smiled when he opened the care package from home. It was an atypical assortment, perhaps: a new fishing lure (at least he’d finally talked Lorraine out of purchasing them based on cuteness alone), new underwear and socks, some of that rough cane sugar he liked for the way it donut-caked at the bottom of his coffee cup, and his old ring. He wondered what had prompted the last. Maybe Lorraine was just trying to get him to think of happier times… He drowsed a minute, remembering, those memories scented with honeysuckle and summer bright, then put the ring on and went back to work. 

The next morning Radar did his dance - phone in one hand, messages sorted with efficiency, calls taken, calls returned - coffee passed over to Henry as he came in. Radar’s attentions were so familial and affectionate that when he was sleepy, Henry had to remind himself not to kiss him on the head. 

“Morning, kid. Any nightly news we need to deal with this morning?”

Radar didn’t get a chance to speak before Henry agreed with him that he definitely  _ shouldn’t  _ sign those passes Hawkeye had been angling for. Tokyo wasn’t ready for the likes of Hunnicutt and Pierce. 

“Sir?” Radar looked like someone had plunked a pot over his head and started banging on it with a wooden spoon. “Did you just…” he tugged on his ear and tilted his head, trying to adjust the signal. “Did you talk over me, sir?” He sounded aghast. 

_ Cheese and crackers, kid!  _ Henry wanted to exclaim.  _ You do it to me  _ **_all the time!_ ** But he couldn’t stand to see his boy upset. “Sorry,”  _ sweetheart _ , he didn’t say it - just  _ almost _ \- but he knew that Radar would hear it anyway.

What he heard in answer though - Henry  _ didn’t  _ expect that! 

“Radar?” 

It wasn’t  _ entirely  _ words - more of a mishmash of images and sensations with words making a fence for it all. It was the softness of lamb’s wool and the fresh smell of new hay that would see the stock through winter. It was the gold coin impossibility of a harvest moon. It was cane sugar soda at a Saturday double feature movie show and the glossy pages of a new adventure comic. It was safety, contentment, absence of fear - all the things a father should be. It was a wish, too, from a young man who was still very much a boy. 

“Adopt you, huh?” Henry said, eyes staring away into the future. “Well, I dunno about the legal beagles of it all, but if that’s what you want, kid, I guess it’s what we’re doing.”

Radar hugged him then - and Henry felt the sunlight on dandelions warmth of his happiness and just snuggled in to enjoy it. 

***

Happy as the results of Henry’s “magic” ring were, both the CO and his boy agreed it was best to leave Radar’s gift in just his head; too many signals were liable to lead to wires getting crossed. So, Henry took the ring off, thought about how to tell Lorraine about the boy he planned to keep (at least during the winter months when the farm could spare him) and dumped it in a drawer… where it would have stayed if Radar hadn’t gotten mad at Hawkeye treating him like a kid (again) and blurted out the ring’s properties. 

That Hawkeye Pierce was a gifted man, few would argue. He was movie screen handsome (where Korea hadn’t bitten away at his looks) and his beauty was enhanced by the parts in him that were attuned to and given over to joy. Added to this was his admirable inability to tolerate injustice, his loyalty, his surgical skill, and his (admittedly sometimes insufferable) wit. 

What could a man such as this possibly lack?

Radar knew and he tried to warn the Captain away from the reef he seemed determined to smash himself against. “It’s a great friendship,” the younger man said. “Why’d you wanna muck it up by poking around in his head? Besides - all that blood and being exhausted - it’s probably a mess in there!”

Hawkeye didn’t take his advice and his terrible pain - Radar saw it in his eyes for the next six months, until it learned to skitter out of the light and hide itself under the rocks - was one of his greatest wartime regrets. 

Radar, without the benefit of Henry’s ring, knew what Hawkeye had gone looking for in the mind of his best friend, Trapper John: a bright gold flame to match the one Trapper had kindled in him. What he’d found… well, Radar knew that, too, and felt all the more grateful for Henry’s easy acceptance of his thoughts (they had just been talking about building the kids a rope swing when they got back, like the one Radar had played on in the barn loft). It wasn’t that Hawk was  _ absent  _ from Trap’s mind; he just wasn’t a permanent fixture. He was a war friend. A good time pal. A companion dictated by proximity as much as anything else, like the nurses Trap took into his arms. 

Hawkeye returned the ring without a word and Radar swore he’d never reveal its odd powers ever again. 

***

Radar kept his word, but on one of Henry’s trips to Seoul, Frank Burns took over his desk… and, playing in Henry’s desk drawer like a child, his finger just happened to slip into the ring. He pulled the cold bit of metal out and frowned at it. He didn’t think men should wear jewelry (Henry’s belly button ring - part of a Halloween costume - had driven him to write Henry’s superior, General Mitchell. The lack of disciplinary action taken by Mitchell had told Frank all he needed to know about  _ him _ ) and this thing was gaudy - chunky gold with a bit of gemstone stuck in. Definitely not masculine. Maybe even a bit Papist. But it sat on his finger anyway and he toyed with it - was still toying with it when Henry returned.

The CO was, and looked, tired. “Everything still standing, Frank? Everything still out there that oughta be?”

This was what Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake  _ said _ . 

_ This  _ is what Major Franklin Delano Marion Burns heard:  _ You drive me dippy, Frank, but when I’m gone, it’s a right comfort to know it’s your by the book butt in that chair. Can you imagine Pierce in command? McIntyre? There wouldn’t be a camp to come back to! Or a drink!  _

Head champagne-bubble buzzy, Frank happily poured his CO a drink even though he hadn’t asked for one and Frank didn’t really approve. Henry gave him a smile and a nod at this and even invited Frank to join him! The Major declined though, dropping Henry’s ring back into the drawer; he was valued and he wanted to be alone with this strange and happy discovery, to find just where it fit in his sense of self. Maybe he’d have to add more rooms! At the door, he saluted Henry and walked into a new day. 

***

The ring only came to the hand in camp most familiar with boxing gloves and rosary beads because Henry swept a pile of paperwork into his arms, in a hurry to make a flight, and the ring had tagged along and hopped out into Mulcahy’s garden. Picking it up, the priest wore it a moment so that it wouldn’t get lost in the pocket change destined for the orphanage. 

That evening at dinner he described being sent a vision. “I could hear - not with my ears, but in my mind - the gratitude of the bees for the golden grains of the pollen… the gratitude of the plants - for  _ me _ . It was like the contented laughter of a loving God.”

“You need to wear a hat when you’re out in the sun all day, Father,” said Margaret.

Radar said nothing, but he made sure Henry’s ring got back where it belonged! 

***

Let no one say that Hawkeye Pierce didn’t learn from his mistakes. When BJ Hunnicutt came to Korea, he silently promised that he would accept what he was given and ask for no more. If he longed, sometimes, to know exactly what spaces he occupied in the enigmatic young surgeon’s heart and mind, he did not use Henry’s ring to find out. 

Radar quietly saw all of this and was proud of the lean, lonely Maine native… until the night when Hawkeye  _ did  _ ask for that gold band. 

“Not a good idea, sir,” Radar warned him. Cautioning a superior didn’t come natural to the boy, but he had a heart as soft as the worn stuffing inside the teddy bear in his bunk; he couldn’t bear to think of his hero broken hearted all over again. 

“It’s not for me,” Hawk promised. “I swear I won’t even put it on.”

Radar gave him a look Henry thought of as “the ol’ don’t treat me like I don’t know what side is up, here, sir” stare. 

“Seriously,” Pierce insisted. “Look, Margaret’s dad is on the base, right?”

“Sure.”

“Well, maybe you noticed she’s kinda having a rough go of it with big Al.” 

Radar had, but he couldn’t see how Henry’s ring was going to fix that. 

Hawkeye explained and Radar found himself nodding happily, a little brother drawn into the warmth of his older brother’s circle, won over by his enthusiasm. His doe-sweet eyes shined. “It’s a good plan, sir,” he agreed. “I’m in.” 

Radar never learned  _ how  _ Hawkeye talked Margaret into wearing a ring many sizes too big (some lie about trying to size a ring for Peg on BJ’s behalf, maybe?). What he did know was that when Colonel Albert Houlihan left, Margaret slid down the canvas side of her tent and wept tears of joy, secure in her father’s love. 

***

When Henry returned home, where he spent his free time remodeling a fishing cabin for him and Radar to escape to (accepting that Radar would somehow know where everything was even when he did not) he packed so hurriedly that some things were left behind, including the ring. It was quite forgotten in a corner box of lost and found until Radar decided to put it back into circulation. 

It took time and planning, but Radar got the haughty Major to handle the trinket under the guise of evaluating its worth. He had first considered a poker game, but that had seemed too risky. Then  _ all  _ the players might handle it and everyone might know too much about everyone else… and Radar was too good-hearted to go dragging everyone’s skeletons out of the closet. What he was after was happiness for a friend. Whether it will result once Winchester  _ heard... _ that wasn’t up to little Radar. 

But then, if Winchester could look on Klinger’s heart - big and golden as a dandelion bouquet - and feel nothing, maybe he deserved the nothing he’d get at the end of the evening. 

_ That  _ had been the real trick. Like playing spy for Hawk during a big card game, it had taken planning to get Winchester to handle that ring - to try it on - while Klinger was around. By the look on the Major’s sad, lovely face, Radar knew the  _ exact  _ moment Winchester picked up Klinger’s thoughts. When his eyes softened, Radar knew everything would be okay. 

Content that all was as it should be, Radar headed for his bunk to write it all down for Henry. He’d send the ring back with the letter; Winchester wasn’t going to need it to figure Klinger out, Radar thought, chuckling; Klinger wouldn’t have any problem speaking up once he knew he was loved - and Radar thought that would happen real soon. 

_ Hope you get another ring out of it, Klinger,  _ thought Radar, sending the thought out over the camp, warm and golden as a floating lantern.  _ Maybe even two.  _

End! 

  
  



End file.
